


I sing this song for funerals... no rust

by orphan_account



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Modern AU, Necrophilia, morgues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-30
Updated: 2015-03-30
Packaged: 2018-03-20 00:32:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3629982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Merlin is a necrophile and Arthur is the mortician's brother.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I sing this song for funerals... no rust

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the mortician's daughter, by he black veiled brides.  
> A twisted piece of work I came up with. Well, whatever.

Morgana leaves the morgue open on Tuesday evenings. 

She comes home early, the corpses stiff and made up in the death house, soaks in the bath for an hour before she makes bland pasta and sauce for the three of them. More often than not she forgets the salt. Mordred makes a face as he tries to eat it. Arthur's more used to it. It's been this way for two years. Neither of them make any comment though. There's a hopeless look in Morgana's eye, far cry from the fiery, vivacious woman that they know and love dearly. After supper, she disappears into the back room in the corner of the cottage and Arthur puts Mordred to bed. It's routine, really. And Arthur has not questioned it for years. It's for the best anyway. Morgana will come in later and read Mordred  something from the"Just so stories", even though Mordred's heard them all before and doesn't even like them at all. And Arthur will slink out of the house softly, like a lonely ghost, and spend the night looking at the stars.

There's always a place for everyone in Ealdor, where no one asks awkward questions and no one pries. It's a sunny little village like any other, quiet, nondescript, with warm summers and cold winters, no warmer and no colder than it got anywhere else. Morgana was loved figure, despite being the undertaker. Mordred was her son, a sweet child who was fathered by the boy who used to make coffins for her. Arthur belonged on a different part of the fabric. He was the archaic school master stuck in a world that was too new for his liking. He taught mathematics at the public school three bus stops away, yet village boys lagging by in their work could always find him at the Vicarage after church. He was happy, yet he was so serious. The old matrons of the village loved him, their daughters, not so much. He never thought he would be happy here, what being used to the din and clack of London (which had, of late, lost so much of its charm. Then again...)

 

"Can we have the blue one with stars, Da?" Mordred knows Arthur isn't his father, but that he is. They're picking wallpaper for Mordred's room. (Morgana's picked a raucous pink for the living room, and Arthur wants a nondescript beige for his space). The lady behind the counter smiles at him. "Of course you can." Arthur says, ruffling his hair. It's been a long day, and now that they have the paper, they can get the paint and start making the cottage all new. It's a gloomy evening and they reckon they should pick Morgana up from the morgue on the way back. He's not keen on little Mordred going into the death house, so he leaves him at the vicarage before heading on to the morgue.

Like in all good places, Le Faye's (the establishment which belonged to Morgana's step-father Gorlois) was a hidden corner in a back alley of Ealdor. Arthur slips in softly, the door giving no resistance to him. It's too early for Morgana to be out of the shop. Besides, the door are open.

"Morgana?" he calls softly. she's not in the front room, where she sits most of the day. which means she's in the dark room (death room. where she keeps the corpses.) He slides through the rows of empty coffins and panels of wood, sliding in slowly to the back of the shop. 

"Morgana?" he calls again. 

There's faint sounds in the dark room. Morgana's working on a corpse, then. Still, he reckons he'll let her know he's in. Just pop his head and give her a look. So she knows he's there. He can see someone moving in the dark room, can see a flash of brown curls, leaning over a corpse.

"Hey Morg-"

It isn't Morgana. 

Arthur stares.

He's handsome, like a faerie from the stories they read to Mordred on not-Tuesdays, lithe, pale with dark dark hair and red red lips and blue blue  _blue_ eyes. He could mesmerize Arthur with a glance, already did, clouding his mind with strange fantasies and the smell of freshly hewn wood. Long milky arms with long milky fingers, five deep in the cadaver's hair, the others stroking it, plunging their lengths into its dark, festering cunt.

"Holy God!" the man moans, finding his release as Arthur covers his mouth, muffling a scream. The strangers eyes focus on him as if seeing him for the first time, and widen with something akin to innocence (except it isn't innocence, not at all. no no no.). And fear. He looks breathtaking, all flushed and sated, and yet-

_Defiling a cadaver._

_Necrophile._

_Abomination._

Arthur turns back and runs away.

He spends the entire night with Mordred in his arms, rocking the little boy under the starry starry sky.

He'd forgotten that it was Tuesday.

 

"You're not supposed to be here." he folds his arms, watching and trying not to shudder as the blue eyed man kisses the corpse sweetly on the lips, as if it were a sleeping lover, not a rotting mound of flesh. "Does it matter to you?"

"She's my sister. She'll be in trouble."

"Morgana knows that I need it. That I want it." "When someone finds out..."

The man looks up, and again Arthur is struck by how breath taking he is. "No one will." he says confidently.

 

Morgana catches him one evening when he gets home from watching the fey man, her eyes a silver veil of anger. "What the hell are you doing, Arthur?" "I know what happens in your morgue every Tuesday." he wants to say. He doesn't. But she pales anyway. Arthur looks at her tiredly. "I won't tell Morgana. you're my sister, and I would never besmirch your honour like that." She gapes for a moment, and then shuts her mouth.

"Merlin." she says over dinner that night. "His name is Merlin." 

They both ignore Mordred when he asks (persistently) who that is.

 

He's stopped kissing the corpses. Only touching them softly, only because he's used to it. Only the face and the hair and the arms. Never... there. Not since the mortician's brother appeared anyway. 

_Arthur._

He's the summer day that Merlin has long longed for. Only creatures like Merlin, they can't touch summer days. They're  _filthy. Used. Not even human._ They need to be locked away, hidden from the light, because they're  _monsters, not people._ And when he sees the revulsion in Arthur's eyes, he knows it's true. 

Merlin's loved before, and he loves still, only he hasn't been loved in return. They mock him, awkward and gangly with his big ears and his silly smile. The girls kiss him for fun, because he's sweet and smart and all, but they don't  _mean_ to kiss him, not like Gwen kisses Lance. 

It doesn't help either that the only living humans he's willing to bed are men, and the only girls he can bear to touch are corpses. He feels filthy as he slides his hands over the smooth stomach of a young girl, as old as Freya when she died  _(was raped and thrown down a well to rot. They never went near the well after that.)_ Morgana doesn't understand, but she knows, in that insidious way that she does, that he  _needs_ it. That he craves it, so that he can be alright. He knows that she's repulsed by it, she can see the deadened look in her eye, as she leaves, her pity, her repulsion.  _Monster,_ the coffins scream at him. He'd like to be in one, sometimes. Only the mortician knows how twisted his desire is. And she won't tell. 

"Why do you do it?" The man is there again. He's a school master, Merlin knows, teaches in the public school out in Gedref. He's not much older than him, only been teaching two years or so. He teaches Daegal and Gilli down at the vicarage when he has time. daegal and Gilli were lucky. They weren't  _monsters._

This time, though, he's not looking on with disgust, only curiosity. Merlin shrugs. "I need it."

 

_Unresisting partners._

_Low self esteem._

_Childhood trauma._

Arthur watches hawkishly as Mordred plays on the swings, the knowledge of Merlin, that someone so lovely, who reminded him so sweetly of Morgana and Mordred in turns, was hurt so badly that he would seek comfort in the dead, weighing on him. He wonders where this attraction, where this pull comes from. It is different from the love he bears Morgana and Mordred and his long dead parents. different from the love he has for his students and his friends. More intense than what he once felt for Guinevere. It is an attraction, he knows that. It is not a burning desire, but a niggling curiosity, a need to hold and protect, to love. Arthur wonders if he's acting like that terrible terrible lover in that terrible terrible cliche series that the girls in his school like to read and the boys in his school would like to burn. 

 

"You watch me. Every time I'm here." It's the first time he starts a conversation. He shouldn't shouldn't  _shouldn't._ But he does. He watches Arthur too. Watches him teach Daegal how to calculate gradients, watches him carry Morgana's groceries for her and chat to old ladies on the street. How he ignores the girls in the village studiously, how they ignore him (how  _could_ one ignore Arthur?). How he hoists the boy-  _Mordred-_ up to his hip when it's dark and they have to climb up to their house. He watches enough to know that Arthur is faulted (arrogant, proud, supercillous, temperamental to a fault, downright rude to some people)

Arthur's standing at the door again, and Merlin knows it isn't some perverse voyeurism. He's never ever been roused by the corpses since Arthur appeared at the mortician's. He likes to touch them though. They still feel right, all stiff and unresponsive under his fingers.  But he's only rarely aroused by them after Arthur. 

"Who are you, Merlin?" He asks.

 _A monster. A freak. A grotesque cheap._ "What do you do?" He's only curious. And he was asking. Not the why and the how, but about  _him._ The boys he liked never did that. 

But Arthur was a summer day.

It had been a summer day that they'd come to the house. Father had never been there, and mother had tried to shield him, and they'd killed her, blood spilling out rich and red from the crack of her skull. She was long dead when he had run away. But not before he saw what he did to her rapidly cooling slowly stiffening form. 

It had been summer again, when Freya had been chasing butterflies and the Man (his name was Halig) dragged her away to the woods. He remembered screaming. 

Arthur was summer. And summer was bad things laced up in strawberries and ice cream and lilies of the valley. Arthur was a good thing. But still...

"I'm Merlin," he says. And proceeds to ramble on about his life. Little disjointed things about him, that make him smile and frown in turns. It's a start, if any, but he knows he's gone when when Arthur laughs at a joke he never meant to make which, in retrospect, was rather  _funny._

 

"Don't get attached to him. I can't lose you," Morgana sets down a bland, saltless pasta on a Saturday afternoon. The tension seeks to come to head. She's been quiet and dark all week. It's not sitting well with Mordred. He bangs the table with his fork.

"He needs help." "Sweetheart, he's a madman. Please don't-" his sister chokes. "He's exhausting, draining even. I can't lose you." And this time, Mordred looks up. "Da's leaving?" 

"No." "Then?"

"Da's in love." He doesn't look back up at Morgana.

 

"Who was Mordred's ma?" 

"Morgana. She had him by the boy who used to build coffins in the morgue. Alvarr was his name. I don't know if she loved him."

"Not your son, then?"

"Almost as good as."

 

He used to love to paint as a child. He thinks he still might. He thinks he will, now that Arthur's watching with a smile on his face. Alive, warm. And reaches out with a warm hand to touch his cheek. He savours the feel, if only for a moment.

For the first time, he touches the dead and feels revulsion.

 

For the first time Arthur walks into an empty morgue. He breathes a sigh of relief. The corpse on the table is untouched.

Morgana smiles when she comes home the next Tuesday. They eat baked beans on toast and watch the stars outside, Mordred stretched between them. Arthur clings to them, a little tight if only to shut out the loneliness that feels out of place in his chest.

 

The colours flit like angels on the canvas, and Gaius calls him a prodigy. somehow though all the greens and the blacks and the purples fade away and only red blue and bright gold remain. Blue eyes, gold hair, red red red like the sweater he wore on cold days.

 

 _Come find me,_ the note says, the one Daegal gave him shyly. "He's real nice," Gilli pipes up from the side. And that's all he needs.

 

There's paint all over the room and all over he sheets, and Merlin couldn't care less.

He's being loved, being held by a  _living, breathing_ man. A living breathing man is  _letting Merlin_ love him. It feels like heaven. Like a summer with strawberries and ice creams and lilies of the valley and red red roses, without the blood and the flesh and the screams in the woods.

He kisses a living loving  _breathing_ man, and for the first time, feels  _alive._

And now that he's alive, he can never go back to the dead.


End file.
